Julian O

In the early 1990s, there was a com­puter called the Ra­tional 1000, which was pretty much a spe­cial­ised de­vel­op­ment ma­chine for pro­duc­ing code in the Ada pro­gram­ming lan­guage.

The “shell” lan­guage for the sys­tem was… Ada.

It was a weird choice—Ada is com­piled. Ada is a strongly/​strictly typed lan­guage. Ada is cer­tainly not terse, but the IDE helped with a lot of the boiler­plat­ing. It is not what you nor­mally think of as a script­ing lan­guage.

Nonethe­less, I think it was very suc­cess­ful. The users all knew Ada well. The com­mand line (it­self, writ­ten with the help of an IDE) knew all the types of all the pa­ram­e­ters and could help com­plete them (alas—very, very slowly).

I see this as an anec­dote to sup­port your idea that a typed script­ing lan­guage could work.